English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.
Conductor Oliver Zeffman has commissioned the very first opera for a socially distanced world, which is now available to watch exclusively on Apple Music. Eight Songs From Isolation has been written by eight leading composers, specifically for streaming - rather than live performance - and is the first opera written for a time when the performers were unable to meet in person.
Leading freelance musicians unite in Parliament Square to call for targeted support for colleagues in the arts and entertainment sector.
Duo Lewis Murphy (composer) and Laura Attridge (writer) have launched a charitable song project entitled Notes From Isolation. The resulting songs, featuring some of the UK's top singing talent, are being released online between August and October 2020 and can be enjoyed free of charge.
The Royal Opera House is thrilled to announce an exciting, wide-ranging new line-up for its autumn programme. For the first time, extraordinary performances will be accessible online for a global audience through livestreams and for socially distanced live audiences at our home in Covent Garden. In a global first, we present a new opera in hyper-reality, alongside repertory favourites from both artistic companies.
Some of the most famous and outstanding stars from the opera world are to take part in a very special evening from Wexford Festival Opera, including Aigul Akhmetshina, Joseph Calleja, Daniela Barcellona, Juan Diego Flórez, Igor Golovatenko, Ermonela Jaho, Sergey Romanovsky, and many more.
Following its successful launch in 2019, OperaStreaming streams nine operas on YouTube from the historic opera houses of Emilia-Romagna during the 2020-21 season, with fully-staged productions of Verdi's La traviata in October from Modena and Verdi'sOtello from Bologna in...
‘A brief history of song’ is the subtitle of the 2020 Oxford Lieder Festival (10th-17th October), which will present an ambitious, diverse and imaginative programme of 40 performances and events.
Bampton Classical Opera returns to the Baroque splendour of London’s St John’s Smith Square on November 6 with a concert performance of Gluck’s one-act opera The Crown, the first in the UK since 1987. The performance will also be filmed and available to watch on demand on the Bampton website from 9 November.
While many of us spent lockdown at home taking it a little easier, composer Andrew Synnott wrote an opera.
Owen Wingrave is part of the new Interim Season of 19 brand new events, all free to view online between September and December 2020.
The Arts Council has awarded innovative UK charity Music and Theatre For All (MTFA) a major new grant to develop three ambitious new projects in the wake of Covid 19.
English National Opera (ENO) will reopen the London Coliseum to socially distanced audiences on 6 and 7 November for special performances of Mozart’s Requiem. These will provide audiences with an opportunity to reflect upon and to commemorate the difficulties the nation has faced during the pandemic.
The Royal Opera House is proud to continue its curated #OurHouseToYourHouse programme into the autumn, bringing audiences the best of the ROH through a new series of Friday Premieres and cultural highlights.
After six months of closure, the Royal Opera House is thrilled to be opening its doors to the public as part of Open House London weekend, giving visitors a taste of one of the world’s most famous theatres for free.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields is thrilled to announce re:connect - an eight concert series with live socially distanced audiences at its namesake church, St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The autumn concerts will take place at 5pm & 7:30pm on two Saturdays per month with guest artists including baritone Roderick Williams, soprano Carolyn Sampson and composer-conductor-pianist Ryan Wigglesworth performing a wide range of repertoire.
Music and poetry unite and collide across centuries, from the Medieval to the Enlightenment to the present day. This year, the Oxford Lieder Festival will present a thrilling and innovative programme comprising more than forty events streamed over eight days.
The English Concert with artistic director Harry Bicket is delighted to announce a series of concerts from 1-15 October 2020. The concerts take place in historic London venues with star soloists and will be performed and streamed live to a paying audience at 7pm GMT on each performance date. The programmes include first-class vocal and instrumental works from the two pillars of the English Baroque, covering different aspects of the repertoire.
Glyndebourne has announced plans for a ‘staycation’ series of socially-distanced indoor performances, starting on 10 October 2020.
The Royal Opera House is delighted to announce two packed evenings of opera and ballet, live from our stage in Covent Garden and available to view wherever you are in the world online.
Most opera-world publicity is accorded star singers, but we take another tack here to look at American tenor Keith Jameson who has made a specialty of character or comprimario parts, while at the same time building a solid reputation as sophisticated musician and actor, a performer who can seize the moment and elevate a role to first rank for the time he is on stage.
Appearing as the young Novice in Benjamin Britten’s shipboard tragedy, Billy Budd, in Santa Fe Opera’s 2008 season, Jameson proved what he can do most impressively. His young novice sailor first appears shirtless and scarred with lash marks, the victim of a sadistic master-at-arms (John Claggart), and the cruelty of life at sea; later, he must confront Claggart and plead for mercy at the hands of a sadist in a highly emotional scene. Sounds like a daunting assignment for a 40-year old singer who grew up in a small town in South Carolina. How does he do it, and how does he manage to look and sound a crazed lad of 25?
“I am at least as much actor as singer,” Jameson explained when I asked him. “The two arts cannot be separated.” He seems disarmingly mild off stage, modest of build with blue eyes and dark hair, an infectious grin and gentle mien, which can explode into unexpected fireworks onstage in the heat of performance.
“Ben Britten is my favorite kind of music and I hope to do a lot more of it,” Jameson said. Thus far he has sung Peter Quint in Turn of the Screw, and in Britten’s Curlew River, as well as some of the British master’s choral and sacred music, and has his eye on the ingénue role of Albert Herring, in that captivating comedy of village ‘types’ and coming-of-independence. “I almost want to live in England, and specialize in Britten and in Baroque music,” Jameson admits. He would doubtless be welcome, with musicianship grounded in far more education than most professional singers enjoy.
After music and vocal studies at college in South Carolina, Jameson joined the Eastman School at Rochester, N. Y., and earned a Master’s Degree in conducting and Doctorate of Musical Performance in voice. “I tried choral conducting and a bit of teaching, but my real love is singing. I most love to perform on stage and make acting and musical expression become one unified experience – for both performers and audience. I just live for it,” he beams. Jameson continues to refine his art and with good results. “For about a year now I’ve been working with a new teacher in New York, opening the voice, and that volume you heard in the high range in Billy Budd is a result. Vocal growth has opened a wider horizon for me.”
Keith Jameson as Peter Quint, with Lisa Houben as Miss Jessel, in The Turn of the Screw, Opera Royal de Wallonie in Liege, Belgium, April 2007 [Photo courtesy of ORW]
“ When the Novice is dragged before Claggart he is a terrified, humiliated boy, and he begs for mercy, virtually for his life. He’ll do anything to avoid further physical cruelty,” Jameson explains. In the face of the boy’s screaming agony, Peter Rose, the powerful English bass impersonating Claggart, maintained an almost eerie cool, his low-keyed response creating a tremendous tension in the scene. “It’s hard work to set up such extreme contrasts and takes stamina and real acting; that is why I loved doing it. And playing against Peter Rose is something special,” Jameson found. Few in his Santa Fe audience knew Jameson could sing with such passionate power, so his recent performance proved an exciting revelation.
Jameson sees plenty of years ahead as operatic tenor, but when I asked if he eventually planned to become a teacher, his reply was immediate: “No indeed, I want to run an opera company” (This guy is full of surprises!) “I’m serious,” he continued. “I have started a small chamber music festival, January each year a time that needs a seasonal pick-up – and I present at my Southern home town a musical stage performance, some sacred music and a program of pure chamber music, and I want to make that grow into a music festival in due time that specializes in presenting American opera.” He cites the example of another character tenor and former Santa Fe performer, Darren Keith Woods, who switched from performance to management and is now the successful general director of the Ft. Worth opera, which he converted from conventional company into an annual opera festival. “Darren has shown us how, so here is hoping,” Jameson said. “But I have many roles to play and many songs to sing before that happens.”
Dr. Jameson has earned an exciting professional future, whatever form it takes.
J. A. Van Sant © 2008
Keith Jameson as Nanki-Poo and Anna Christy as Yum-Yum in Jonathan Miller's production of The Mikada, New York City Opera and English National Opera [Photo courtesy of English National Opera]